Against Anti †Social Activities Essay

Anti hearty demeanour the construction of a hatred Now the New roil judicature has revealed its respect get alongnda, the worry of anti companionable deport custodyt has moved to the forefront of establishmental debate. But what is it? by Stuart WaitonAnti affable opposed to the principles on which golf club is constituted. (Oxford English Dictionary, 1885). Anti accessible contrary to the natural laws and customs of society causing annoyance and censure in others childrens a hearty doings. (Oxford English Dictionary, 1989). Anti well-disposed behaviour is utilize as a catch- all(prenominal) term to describe everything from noisy neighbours and graffito to kids reprieve break through on the street. Indeed, it appears that al close to any kind of unpleasant behaviour is counterbalance away categorised as unsociable, with the behaviour of children and boyish nation virtually a lot labelled as such (1). This expresses a growing science that the laws and custom s of society argon cosmos undermined by hooligan youngsters. b bely the term anti accessible behaviour was rarely utilise until the 1990s. Throughout the 8ies a couple of articles a category were printed in the UK discussing anti accessible behaviour, whereas in January 2004 al oneness there were over 1,000 such articles (2). Not even the most pessimistic hearty critic would suggest a parallel affix in problem behaviour. Indeed, in recent geezerhood there has been a slight bechance in portrayalual vandalism, for example, against a dramatic subjoin in refreshfulspaper mentions of antisocial behaviour (3).When looking at the dilute of antisocial behaviour, the starting point for most commentators is to accept that the problem exists and to whence work out why pot are much(prenominal) antisocial today. The collapse of communities is often travel ton as a get a line influence in the rise of antisocial behaviour, with young people growing up without coercive role mo dels and a theoretical account at bottom which to cultivate into sociable with child(p)s. This intellection of the spillage of a reek of alliance or indeed of society rings true. We are indeed much than atomised and individuated today, and there are few common bonds that h gaga people together and give them a social identity. It is less clear, however, that this necessarily means people are more and more out of control, antisocial and on the road to woefulity.Alternatively you could argue that this fragmentation of communities and of social value has aided foment a kitchen-gardening of hero-worship (4) a nuance that elevates what were previously unsounded as piddling problems into socially large ones. This essay examines the construction of the social problem of antisocial behaviour, by c oncentrate oning, non on the behaviour of young people, provided on the role of the semi governmental elite. It may be understandable for a tenants association or topi cal anaesthetic councillor to be intermeshed by the write of noisy neighbours and strong-armer children hardly when for the prime minister to prioritise this issue as one of his main concerns for the future of the nation seems rather strange. What is it that has put antisocial behaviour so high up on the semi semi governmental agenda? Constructing plague as a social problemWhen introducing laws against antisocial behaviour, curfews, and saucily hatred initiatives, the New wear government invariably asserts that these are in chemical re sourion to the concerns of the commonplace. While there is undoubtedly a high level of public anxiety slightly criminal offence and closely the various problems and irritations now depict as antisocial behaviour, this anxiety is cl archaeozoic shaped by the concerns of the semi policy-making elite. It is also worth noning that when the government highlights particular social problems as existence significant for society, it puts o ther issues and outlooks on the besidestocks sculptural relief burner. The elevation of criminal offence and, more recently, antisocial behaviour, into a policy-making issue has helped twain to rein draw off the entailment given to this kind of behaviour and to frame the way social problems are understood.By defining antisocial behaviour as a study(ip) social problem, the political elite has, over the past decade, helped to generate a spiralling preoccupation with the petty behaviour of young people. At no clock in history has the issue of horror as a social problem in and of itself been so central to all of the political parties in the UK and yet, there has been a significant statistical fall in abhorrence itself. The key difference surrounded by the deterrent example panics over plague and social ailment in the past and anxiety about offensive and dis couch today is that this anxiety has now been institutionalised by the political elite. Up until the mid-sevent ies the political elite, as distinct from private politicians and the media, generally challenged or dismissed the panics associated with youth crime and subsequently held in check the produce they had. In opposing sure chats for more laws and regulations on society, more extreme right-winger ways of rationality these problems were often rejected and the institutionalisation of measures that help create new norms were equally opposed.For example, while the good panic that arose in the media or so the Mods and bikers in the 1960s has been widely discussed thanks to Stanley Cohens famous report card Folk Devils and Moral Panics, graduation exercise- set honours degree published in 1972 (5), these concerns were marginal to politicians, and neer became an organising principle of political brio. More recently, however, the political elite has panicked and legis juveniled on the strength of extreme one-off events, like for example the Dunblane shootings in 1996, which resul ted in the criminalise of handguns, or the killing of Victoria Climbie in 2000, which led to legislation requiring schools to work around child resistance. An all important(p) consequence of the institutionalisation of anxiety is that in demarcation line to the intermittent honorable panics of the past, panics are now an almost permanent gasconade of society. And whereas virtuous panics oddly before the 1990s were generated inside a tralatitious conservative moral example, today it is the new amoral absolute of safety inside which they tend to develop.Politicising crimeThe politicisation of crime can be dated back to the 1970s, with the 1970 Conservative government world the first to identify itself explicitly as the party of law and night club. As crime developed as a political issue through the 1970s, however, it was fiercely contested. When Conservatives shouted law and order, the unexpended would reject the humor that crime was change magnitude or was a socia l problem in and of itself, pointing instead to the social problems thought to be it. Significant sections of the left, influenced in part by complete criminologists in the USA, challenged the panics as they saw them promoted by the so-called New properly. They questioned the official statistics on crime, dispute the labelling of deviants by agents of social control, and attacked the moral and political fanny of these panics (6). Thus, the estimate that crime was a broader social problem remained contested. Crime became a political issue at a time when there was an increase in serious political and social conflicts, fol imprinting the more consensual political framework of the postwar period. Unemployment and strikes increased, as did the numeral of political demonstrations, and the conflict in Ireland erupted.In contrast to the current concern about crime and antisocial behaviour, which emerged in the 1990s, the New Right under Margaret Thatcher promoted crime as a problem very much in limens a traditional ideological framework. In 1988, Alan Phipps described the Tory antenna to crime like this Firstly, it became conflated with a number of other issues whose connection was continually reinforced in the public perspicacity permissiveness, youth cultures, demonstrations, public disorders, scurrilous immigration, student unrest, and mess union militancy. Secondly, crime by now a metaphorical term invoking the objurgate of social stability and decent values was presented as entirely one sentiment of a bitter harvest for which Labours brand of social democracy and wel far-offism was responsible. (7) As part of a political challenge to Labourism in the 1970s and 80s, Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher developed an authoritarian approach to the oppositeness within, which attri scarcelyed greater political consequence to criminality than its motions on victims.Despite an increase in the financial support to the dupe Support schemes in the late 1980s, victims of crime were themselves often used politically, paraded by Conservative politicians and by sections of the media as symbols of disorder, not as the central way of law and order polity or rhetoric itself. Sociologist Joel Best describes a process of typification, whereby an often extreme example of crime is used to secure a more general perceived problem (8). The typical criminals of the 1970s and 1980s were the violent trade union militant and the young b escape mugger. Traditional British values and individual freedoms were contrasted to the collectivist, promiscuous values of the enemy within (9). Even burglars were understood as universe part of the something for goose egg society. Here the criminal, whether the trade union member, the mugger or the burglar, far from being a victim of circumstance, was an enemy of the state, and, importantly, the damage being do was not primarily to the victim of crime nevertheless to the moral values of societ y as a whole. kindly control and public order were promoted within both a political and moral framework in which the deviant in question was likewise understood to have certain political or moral traits that needed to be confronted. Where the petty criminal acts of children were mentioned, the target was not scarce this behaviour itself, nor the impact it had on individuals, but rather the soft liberal moral values held by teachers and social workers that it was argued were undermining British Victorian values of discipline and hard work. In retentivity with this, Thatcher saw the responsibility for cutting crime not simply as that of the government or police, but also of the public, who, it was argued, should take action to keep up themselves.Go directly to jailThe demand for law and order, which at first sight appears to assay a restoration of moral standards, actually acknowledges and acquiesces in their collapse. Law and order surveils to be seen as the only effective ra fter in a society that no longer knows the difference between right and wrong. (Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World, 1977.) American sociologist Christopher Lasch determine key developments in the USA in the 1970s. In the UK, while an increasing emphasis on law and order reflected a certain weakening of the political elites grip on society, crime had been understood in largely ideological and political term. Thatcher used the issue of crime in the battle against Labourism and welfarism. By the early 1990s, however, things were changing fast. John studys desperate and ultimately failed tackle to revitalise the political energetic of the Conservatives with his Back to Basics campaign in 1993 demonstrated the Tories inability to develop a political direction that engaged both the elite and the electorate, and it was at this point that the government activity of crime took on a new, less ideological, but even more authoritarian timbre. The issue of persistent young w rongdoers became a political issue and a treasure social problem in 1992 and exploded as an issue of concern in 1993.The violent trade union militant was now replaced by this persistent young offender as the typical criminal, and, as thence home secretary Michael Howard explained, self-centeredyoung hoodlums would no longer be able to use age as a way of hiding from the law (10). It is important to billet that under Thatcher, despite the most consistent, vitriolic and vindictive affront to rightness and welfare in general, the criminal justice approach to young people developed under principles that resulted in diversion, decriminalisation and decarceration in policy and figure with children in trouble (11). Despite the tough rhetoric with regard to adult crime, the Thatcher administration maintained a pragmatic and even progressive policy towards young offenders. infra John study this all changed.The enemy within became minors rather than the miners (12). With the end of the contestation between right and left, and the resulting dip in the ideological politicisation of crime, the direct control and regulation of the population advantageously increased, and between 1993 and 1995 there was a 25 per cent increase in the number of people imprisoned (13). Politically-based authoritarianism was replaced by a more re officious apolitical authoritarianism which was directed less at the administration and moral values of the organised labour movement and other enemies within, than at the more psychologically-framed behaviour of individuals.Antisocial behaviour now began to be recognised as a significant social problem around which new laws and institutional practices could be developed. Following Lasch, it appears that by 1993 law and order had come to be seen as the only effective resource for a political elite that no longer knew the difference between right and wrong. quite an than using the hold against crime in an effort to shape the moral and politica l outlook of adults in society, the Conservative government progressively opted simply to lock people up, thus acknowledging and acquiescing in its own political and moral collapse.Cultures of crimeAs part of the growing preoccupation with the underclass, the floundering Major government also attacked what he described as a punk culture. This identification of an alien, criminal culture had developed in the late 1980s, as crime panics began to move away from concerns with the organised working class and transformationed on to the behaviour of hooligans and lager louts. The criminalisation of the working class, by the early 1990s, was framed not in political terms, but more and more as an attack on the imagined cultures of alien groups. These aliens were no longer murky outsiders or militants, but white, working class, and young, who could be found not on demonstrations but in pubs and estates across the UK. The door was now open for an attack on the personal behaviour and habit s of anyone seen to be acting in an antisocial manner. The idea of there being alternative cultures, expressed by conservative thinkers at this time, implied that significant sections of the public were no longer open to civilising influences.However, and somewhat ironically, within criminological theory, this idea of impenetrable cultures had developed from radicals themselves back in the 1970s. Stanley Cohen and the ethnical studies groups of the Birmingham Centre had been the first to identify youth cultures and deviant subcultures as specialised types of people existing within a different life-world. At a time of greater political radicalism, these groups were credited with positive difference. With the decline of radical thought these imagined cultures were rediscovered in the 1990s, but this time were seen as increasingly problematic (14). In reality, the growing preoccupation with cultures for example the discovery of a knife culture in 1992 was a reflection of a loss of b elief in governance as a way of understanding and resolving wider social problems. With the loss of ideologically based politics on the right and the left, reflected in the rise of New Labour, the problem of crime became increasingly understood as a problem of and for individuals.New Labour, New Social ProblemsWhat my constituents see as politics has changed out of all recognition during the 20 course of studys or so since I first became their Member of Parliament. From a traditional fare of social security complaints, caparison transfers, unfair dismissals, as well as job losses, constituents now more often than not ask what can be done to stop their lives being do a misery by the unacceptable behaviour of some neighbours, or more commonly, their neighbours children. The Labour MP Frank Field, in his book Neighbours from sanatorium The Politics of Behaviour (2003), explained how politics had shape a matter of regulating behaviour. Field neglected to ask himself whether poor h ousing and a neediness of opportunities are no longer problems, or whether his constituents have simply doomed faith in politicians ability to do anything about them. Similarly, Field unheeded the role the Labour Party itself l numberered in reducing politics to questions of noisy neighbours and rowdy youngsters, and the way in which New Labour in the 1990s helped to repose traditional social concerns around issues of crime and disorder.A more break up and atomised public was undoubtedly subject to a culture of alarm, but the role of New Labour was central to the progress of concerns related to antisocial behaviour. Under Tony Blair, crime became a central issue for the Labour Party, especially after Blairs celebrated tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime speech in 1994. This ended any major political opposition to the recently reposed social problem of crime. A key right for New Labour now became the right to be, and to feel, safe. By 1997 the New Labour manifesto was s trikingly confrontational around the issues of crime and antisocial behaviour. As the Guardian newspaper noted in April of that year There are areas where Neil Kinnocks manifesto barely ventured. In 1992, crime, for instance, rated quintet paragraphs and mainly concentrated on improving street lighting. Now law and order rates two pages with the now familiar range in perimeter strategies and child curfews fighting for room next to pledges to early legislation for a post-Dunblane ban on all handguns. Such policies seemed unthinkable five years ago.However, in this case, Blairs radicalism with its social authoritarian tinge may play better with the centre rather than the Left. Freed from the politics of welfarism and the labour movement, New Labour in the early 1990s reoriented its approach to the politics of crime, not only accepting that crime was a key social problem in and of itself, but also in expanding it to include the non-criminal antisocial behaviour of neighbours from wickedness and antisocial youth. With the prioritisation of crime and antisocial behaviour came a focus upon the emotional reaction of victims, reflected in the concern with the apprehension of crime. Tackling the epidemic of crime and disorder was now a top priority for Labour in government and securing peoples physical security and freeing them from the fear of crime and disorder was described as the greatest liberty government can guarantee (15).Liberty was transformed from the industrious freedom of individuals, to the protection given to them by government and the police. In contrast to the social and frugal framework within which crime had been largely understood by the active voice labour movement in the 1980s, New Labour now turn to the problems of crime and disorder with reference to a more passive, disorganised and fragmented public. As the government took a more direct approach to tackling crime in its own terms, so the issue expanded to consume problems that previou sly had been understood in more political terms. Accordingly, social, economic and political solutions were replaced by attempts to charm the behaviour of both criminals and antisocial neighbours and children. Imprisonment, antisocial behaviour orders and more intense forms of behaviour management of parents and children increasingly became the political solution offered by New Labour to these problems.Engaged by safetyThe term residential area safety did not exist until the late 1980s, but has subsequently become a core strategic category around which topical anaesthetic governing and national government have developed community-based policies. Community safety is not about crime as such, but is more broadly about the fear of crime and of petty antisocial acts, especially committed by young people, and thought to undermine communities sense of security. Here the loss of community that has been generated by such major social conjures as the defeat of the old Labour movement and the weakening of the postwar institutional welfare framework has been reinterpreted as a problem of mischievous children creating fear across society. An important watershed in the organisation of society around the issues of safety was then shadow home secretary Jack straws disreputable attack in 1995 on the competitive begging of winos, addicts and squeegee merchants (16). plainly a year earlier, stalk had accused John Major of climbing into the gutter alongside the unfortunate beggars when the prime minister had made plainly similar comments (17).There was an important difference, however. Major and his recoverllor Kenneth Clarke had attacked beggars as pogey scroungers beggars in designer jeans who receive benefits and think it is perfectly acceptable to add to their income by begging. Still understanding crime through the political prism of welfarism, Clarke saw begging as a criminal act that defrauded the benefit system. In his later attack on beggars, Jack Straw d elineated the issue. For Straw the problem was not the crime of begging or the political or economic problem of benefit fraud, but the disorderly and fright behaviour of the battleful beggar, which was understood to increase the fear of crime and help to undermine societys sense of wellbeing (18). Jack Straw believed that the Tories had failed to understand the significance of street disorder as a cause of the fear of crime, the loutish behaviour and incivility that made the streets uncomfortable, especially for women and black and Asian people (19).The issue for New Labour was not the political question of benefit fraud, but the emotional sense of security of a newly discovered under attack(predicate) public. By the time the election year of 1997 came around the soon to be prime minister, Tony Blair, had elaborated on the typical beggar. This was not a man quietly scrounging money off the public, but the often drunken in your face lout who would, push people against a wall and d emand money effectively with menace (20). No figures for the rise in bullying beggars were given, but Tony Blair noted that he himself sometimes felt frightened when he dropped his children off at Kings Cross in London a notorious area for winos, prostitutes and aggressive beggars. Straw, using a well-worn feminist slogan, demanded that we reclaim the streets streets that had been brutalised by beggars and graffiti vandals.The radical creation of victimhoodBecause much of this rhetoric of intimidation, abuse and the collapse of communities has its origins in the radical school of criminology, Labour politicians felt able to employ it without embarrassment. In the late 1980s, left-wing and feminist criminologists had a significant influence on Labour-run inner-city councils, carrying out victim surveys, and sitting on a number of council boards particularly within the Greater London Council. Developing out of the radical framework of the early 1970s, a number of such criminologists had become disillusioned with the fight for political and social change and, rather than challenging the focus on crime as an expression of class prejudice as they once might have, increasingly place crime as a major issue, particularly for the poor, women and blacks who were now conceived of as victims of crime. Instead of identifying with and engaging its constituency in terms of politics and public matters, the left sought a new human descent with the poor and oppressed based on their private fears and their sense of powerlessness.Identifying fear as a major factor in the disaggregation of these communities, the so-called left realists noted that it was not only crime but the non-criminal harassment of women and petty antisocial behaviour of young people that was the main cause of this fear among victimised groups (21). The identification of harassed victims of antisocial behaviour rose pro rata with the declining belief in the possibility of radical social change. As the act ive potential of the working class to do something about the New Right declined, Jock Young and other realists uncovered the threatened done to poor. Discussing the shift in Labour councils from radicalism to realism, Young noted that The recent history of radical criminology in Britain has involved a rising influence of feminist and anti-racist ideas and an incasement of left-wing Labour administrations in the majority of the inner-city Town Halls. An initial ultra-leftism has been normalize and often transformed by a prevalent realism in the wake of the third consecutive defeat of the Labour Party on the national level and severe defeats with regards to rate capping in terms of local anesthetic anesthetic politics.The need to encompass issues which had a widespread support among the electorate, rather than thwart in marginal or gesture politics included the attempt to recapture the issue of law and order from the right. (22) Indeed, crime and the fear of it became so central t o Youngs understanding of the conditions of the working class that, on finding that young mens fear of crime was low despite their being the main victims of crime he argued that they had a misguided consciousness. rather than trying to allay womens fears about the slim chance of serious crime happening to them, Young asked whether it would not be more advisable to attempt to raise the fear of crime of young men rather than to lower that of other parts of the public?. For the first time, it was safety that began to frame the relationship between the local permission and the public, expressing a shift from a social welfare model of that relationship to one of protection.The significance of the left realists and feminists at this time is that they were the first people systematically to redefine large sections of the working class as victims, and thus helped to reorient Labour local politics towards a relationship of protection to the public at the expense of the newly targeted a ntisocial youth. It is this sense of the public as basically vulnerable, coupled with the disengagement of the Labour Party from its once active constituency within the working class and the subsequent sense of society being out of control, that has informed the development of New Labours antisocial behaviour initiatives.Issues related to inner-city menace, crime and what was now labelled antisocial behaviour, which had been place as social problems by conservative thinkers periodically for over a century, now engaged the Labour Party. Increasingly for New Labour, having abandoned extensive socioeconomic intervention, the problem of the disaggregation of communities and the subsequent culture of fear that grew out of the 1980s was identified as a problem of crime, disorder and more particularly the antisocial behaviour of young people.The Hamilton Curfew and the politics of fearThe development of the politics of antisocial behaviour was accelerated in 1997 when the first curfew in the UK was set up in a number of housing estates in Hamilton in the westernmost of Scotland. Introduced by a Labour council, this was a multi-agency initiative involving the notoriously zero tolerance Strathclyde Police and the councils social work department. The curfew that followed was officially called the churl pencil eraser Initiative. This community safety approach reflected a number of the trends identified above. Rather than tackling crime as such, the initiative was supposed to tackle the broader, non-criminal problem of antisocial behaviour, in order to keep the community free from crime and also, significantly, free from the fear of crime (23). The rights of people in the community promoted by this initiative were not understood in terms of a libertarian touch of individual freedoms, nor within a welfarist conception of the right to jobs and services. Rather it was the right to be safe and the right to a quiet life that Labour councillors promoted.Without a collecti ve framework within which to address social problems, and concomitantly without a more vigorous sense of the active individual, a relationship of protection was posited between the local chest and the communities in question. Talk of rights and responsibilities implied the right of vulnerable individuals to be and feel safe, not by being active in their own community but rather by any keeping their children off the streets, or by phoning the police whenever they felt insecure. Advocates of the tike Safety Initiative identified all sections of the community as being at venture children were at risk simply by being unsupervised adults were at risk from teenagers who hung about the streets and young people were at risk from their peers, who could, by involving one another in drink, drugs and crime, set patterns for the rest of their lives, as the head of the social work department argued. Even those teenagers involved in antisocial and criminal activities were understood as an at risk group the juvenile delinquents of the past were thus recast as vulnerable teenagers who needed protection from each other.The centrality of the concern with victims of crime, which has developed since the Hamilton curfew was first introduced, is reflected within the curfew itself. In effect all sections of the public were understood to be each victims or vulnerable, potential victims of their neighbours and of local young people. The legitimacy of the police and the local authority was based not on a wider ideological, political or moral platform, but simply on their ability to protect these victims. The politics of antisocial behaviour lacks any clear ideological or moral framework, and therefore it has no obvious constituency. In fact, the basis of the Child Safety Initiative was the weakness of community. Rather than being derived from a politically engaged public, the authority of the council and the police was assumed, or borrowed, from that public in the guise of indiv idual victims. Accordingly, the police in Hamilton constantly felt under pressure to study that the potential victims they were protecting especially the young people who were subject to the curfew support what they were doing.Of course, nobody has a monopoly on borrowed authority. A number of childrens charities also took it upon themselves to speak for the children, arguing that the curfew infringed their rights and coming up with alternative surveys showing that young people opposed the use of curfews. There was little effort to manipulate a substantial political case against the curfew, however. In fact, child-friendly groups and individuals tended to endorse the show of young people and children as thoroughly vulnerable potential victims, and some opposed the curfew only on the basis that children would be forced back into the home where they were even more likely to be abused. Just as Blair was put on the defensive over his attack on aggressive begging by charities camp aigning for the rights of the victimised homeless, so the curfew exposed the politics to charges of harassing or bullying young people. Since the curfew was justified precisely on the basis of protecting young people from these things, the charge was all the more damaging.This was more than a tricky PR issue it demonstrated a fundamental problem with the politics of antisocial behaviour. In presenting the public as vulnerable and in need of protection, the state transformed the basis of its own authority from democratic representation to a more precarious quasi-paternalism in effect it became a victim protection agency. The very social atomisation and lack of political cohesion that underlies the politics of antisocial behaviour means that the authority of the state is constantly in question, despite the fact that its assumptions about the pic of the public are widely shared. As such, the Hamilton curfew gave concrete expression to the attempt to re-engage a fragmented public arou nd the issue of safety, and the difficulties this throws up.Criminalising mischiefIn contrast to the pragmatic approach of past political elites to the issue of crime and occasional panics about delinquent youth, the current elite has come to see crime, the fear of crime and antisocial behaviour as major social problems. With the emergence of New Labour in the 1990s any major political opposition to the issue of crime as a key social problem has disappeared and its centrality to political debate and public discourse was established. Under New Labour, however, the concerns being addressed and the social problems being defined are less to do with crime and criminals than with annoying children and noisy neighbours. These petty irritations of fooling life have been relabelled antisocial behaviour, something which is understood to be undermining both individuals and societys sense of well being. At its most incorrect extreme what we are witnessing is the criminalisation of mischief (2 4). Basil Curley, Manchester councils housing executive, told the Guardian Yes, we used to bang on doors when we were young. But there used to be badger-baiting once, too.Its different now, isnt it? Things are moving on people want to live differently. (25) This casual comparison of children playing knocky door neighbour with the brutality of badger-baiting tells us nothing about young people, but indicates that what has changed is the adult world with an inflated sense of vulnerability effort all antisocial behaviour initiatives. For New Labour the problem of the disaggregation of communities and the subsequent culture of fear that grew out of the 1980s was located within politics as a problem of crime and disorder. Devoid of a sense of social progress, in the 1990s it was the political elites both right and left who became the driving force for reinterpreting social problems within a framework of community safety. wanting any coherent political direction, the government has bo th reacted to and reinforced panics about crime and disorder, institutionalising practices and initiatives based upon societys sense of fear and anxiety. In an attempt both to regulate society and to reengage the public, over the past eight years New Labour has subsequently encouraged communities to participate in and organise around a raft of safety initiatives.Despite the fall in the official crime statistics societys sense of insecurity has remained endemic and no sense of community has been re-established, much to the governments frustration. However, rather than recognising that constructing a society around the issue of safety has only helped to further the publics sense of insecurity, New Labour is fitting ever more reactive and developing more and more policies to regulate a growing range of antisocial activities and forms of behaviour. By thrashing around for solutions to the politics of behaviour in this way, the government is helping to fuel the spiral of fear and alien ation across society. Rather than validating the more robust active side of our character, validation is given to the most passive self-doubting aspects of our personality.Communities and a society that is more at ease with itself would expect men and women of character to resolve problems of everyday life themselves, and would equally condemn those who constantly deferred to the authorities as being antisocial. Today, however, we are all being encouraged to act in an antisocial manner and demand antisocial behaviour orders on our neighbours and their children. Rather than looking someone in the eye and resolving the incivilities we often face, we can increasingly rely on the CCTV cameras to do this, or or else look to the community wardens, the neighbourhood police and the antisocial task force to resolve these problems for us.We are told to act responsibly, but are expected to call on others to be responsible for dealing with noisy neighbours or rowdy children. As this approach d evelops a new public mood is being created, a mood based on the notion of safety first where an increasing number of people and problems become the concern of the police and local authorities. This weakened sense of individuals is a reflection of the political elite itself, which lacks the moral force and political direction that could help develop a sense of community. Ultimately, it is the crisis of politics that is the basis for the preoccupation with curtain-twitching issues the product of an antisocial elite, which is ultimately creating a society in its own image.